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Kubernetes Development Infrastructure Moving Out of Google Control

At the Open Source Summit, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation announces a new project and big move for Kubernetes.

VANCOUVER, B.C.—Google helped to create the Linux Foundation's Cloud Native Computing Foundation in July 2015 with the contribution of the Kubernetes container orchestration system. Although Google contributed Kubernetes, it was still running the core infrastructure for building, developing and testing Kubernetes—until now.

On Aug. 29 at the Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit here, the CNCF and Google announced that Kubernetes development will be moving to the CNCF's control in an effort to further enable multicloud development. Alongside the move, Google announced that it is donating $9 million in Google Cloud Platform credits to enable the CNCF to run Kubernetes developments for the next three years.

"When you bring something to the foundation, you generally want neutral control around it," Chris Aniszczyk, chief operating officer of the CNCF, told eWEEK. "That said, making the CI/CD [continuous integration/continuous development] infrastructure neutral was not the highest priority initially. Instead, the focus was on growing community and getting governance sorted out."

Further reading

Aniszczyk said Google's donation of $9 million in cloud credits will help to get the process going of enabling the CNCF to run the Kubernetes infrastructure on its own. Google's donation is intended to last for three years, after which Aniszczyk said he expects that CNCF membership dues and other funding will help pay for the infrastructure costs of running Kubernetes.

With the move away from Google for the building and testing environment for Kubernetes, there is also a new opportunity for the CNCF to build Kubernetes in a multicloud manner. Kubernetes has been positioned by both the CNCF and vendors as a technology that can run on multiple clouds, enabling enterprises to deploy workloads in a heterogeneous approach, though to date most of the development and testing infrastructure has been on Google. Aniszczyk said the CNCF already has some preliminary efforts in place to build Kubernetes across multiple cloud environments.

Alongside the Google infrastructure move, the CNCF announced the results of its latest user survey showing that the majority of end users continue to deploy Kubernetes on Amazon Web Services. The survey found that 63 percent of all organizations said they deploy Kubernetes on AWS. Google Cloud Platform, in contrast, accounted for 35 percent of deployments, while Microsoft Azure was at 29 percent.

Across all CNCF projects, which include Kubernetes as well as complementary efforts that enable cloud-native deployments, the study found that production usage of CNCF projects has grown by 200 percent since December 2017.

TikV

Also at the Open Source Summit, the CNCF announced that it has accepted the TikV project to become a sandbox effort. TikV is built in the open-source Rust programming language and provides a distributed key value database.

Distributed key value database technology is also at the heart of Kubernetes with the etcd effort. Aniszczyk said that currently Kubernetes is tightly coupled with etcd, but he could see a future where there is an option to use different key value stores, including potentially TikV.

"TikV is already used widely in China by a lot of companies, including Tencent,” Aniszczyk said.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.

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